I may be a tad inebriated, so excuse the spelling mistakes (I’ll do my best to correct said mistakes before I hit the pretty ‘publish’ button). I’ve been thinking a fair amount recently about what the future holds for me – I’ve been offered some paid work by another mod, which I’ve happily taken in an attempt to get me through the dry summer months without a wage from the university. Perhaps I should’ve saved some money while it was coming in? (hah, where’s the fun?)

But at the same time, I desperately battle to ensure that the companys (Calibre Studios that is) projects actually reach a point where we’re happy to show them off to others during the process of getting them published (note, I don’t talk about “possibly” or “maybe”, this game will get published on XBLA).

Though I’m also somewhat weighed down by the need to get the next version of the hidden out the door, much as I like the game, I often find myself struggling to work on it – it’s been over two years since we first released and the returns have been minimal (we’ve built up a good core community, but in terms of money or other returns, we’ve had fuck all) in terms of ‘reknown’. That starts to sap the soul somewhat after a while, we were the first ‘big’ mod out for HL2, we’ve outlasted our first ‘competitor’ Plan of Attack, but still we get little recognition from anyone but our fan base… It’s all a bit depressing!

Hopefully that’ll change with our next release, the new game type will provide the extra ‘umph’ we need to get ourselves known solidly… Of course, we also face the issue of increasing competition, there are way more HL2 mods out and about the place now then there were when we first released many moons ago. Mods like Iron Grip, Insects Infestation and Dystopia have come along providing wider experiences (I won’t say deeper, as that’s not true) which provide more immediate appeal to a wider audience than we do.

What I am looking forward to is the release of UT3, which’ll allow us to finally unveil our next modding project – which is fucking cool as fuck in all honesty and which will allow me to get my teeth into UE3 properly (rather than through a vaguely broken version of RoboBlitz, I mean honestly, why does it not support transparent materials properly?)

Not that you heard that we’re working on a UT3 mod from me, if I hear that rumour spreading, I’ll be sending the lads round to break legs and take names, ok?

We’ve been hard at work developing a portfolio video to send out to development studios who may want to make use of our freelance art services – it’s looking very pretty, so I’ll throw up a link shortly.

It’s been an interesting time with the Hidden, Valve have been busy updating the SDK, so we’ve been playing catchup with that while also implementing the Evacuation Point gametype – I’ve made good progress on that so far, I think I’m at the point where it’s down to visual additions and tweaking the core gameplay following feedback from testers. Of course, to let the testers actually test, I need to dive into Linux and try and figure out why the server isn’t running properly.

Aside from that, I’ve been working on a 2D vertical shooter as a way of giving us a game to add to our portfolio that’s all our code – progress on that is going well, I’ve got the basic gameplay sorted, but I need to tidy it all up, add a menu and start getting some more advanced gameplay features in; pickups and the like. I’m also still working on the Pseudo-3D platformer, but that’s taken something of a back seat at the moment as I was working on the editor but realised I needed to implement picking / selection code and wasn’t sure how to do it! (I’ve since figured it out, I just need to get back into it and get the code working)

Finally, I’ve finished my Masters, graduation in about 6 weeks! I’ll put up some examples of what I did over that year over the next few weeks – with that out of the way, I’ve taken up a job with the University as a “demonstrator” and “help desk technician” – which helps me pay the rent and keeps me in touch with the faculty and some of the help they can provide (like hardware for the office!)

One last thing before I sign off – take a peek at the Great Games Experiment (link) – an interesting new networking site from the guys at Garage Games (link), it’ll be interesting to see how it kicks off once it leaves Beta!